How 4-D Printing Can Synthesize Biological Tissues And Organs Which Grow Themselves
I am rather getting really excited these days since I have put in orders to get a few Arduino kits and Raspberry Pi kits to play around with since I am so deep into the DIY Electronics movement. I’ve already joined the DIY Biohacker movement, being a big fan of Dave Asprey, and taking various types of nootropics, special supplements, and implementing some of his other ideas. To save time, I have given up eating for a month by getting the much anticipated Soylent drink that is so well talked about in Silicon Valley these days. Can I become even more productive and efficient with my time by giving up eating too?
So far, I’ve been reading up on the development of making your own tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation) device and have some confidence that I can possibly build one if I can just find maybe 2-3 months of free time. The idea of using a short burst of direct current to stimulate the electrical activity in my brain is quick attractive to me.
Of course, currently I have 4 major projects going on at the same time. In addition, Tyler has started to remind me that I had promised to you guys that I would build the Lateral Synovial Joint Loading machine which I eluded very early on in the website. That cost has been raised to probably around $1200 and it would require me to ship some parts from China. I do have a rather short attention span and jump from one idea to another, but this one is something I have stuck to the longest in quite a while. I will get around to it, but it won’t be for at least another 2 years.
Some of the ideas that I have been spending my personal time testing on and researching are…
- Electric Planes – Just how viable is Musk’s idea to also make our flying vehicle no longer dependent on petroleum based derivatives?
- Electrical Stimulation for Pain Relief – This one is the other major project I’ve been working on the for the last year or so, which has created a nice passive income stream so far, allowing me some free time to pursue multiple types of strange intellectual pursuits.
- 3-D printers – I plan to buy my own preassembled set in the next few months
- Drones – Imagine a squadron of drones being assembled after their parts are made by 3-D Printing. I use the Raspberry Pi to be used as the controller for the drones.
Of course, some of these ideas, I will give up on, or combine together. However, there might be an even bigger idea that is coming along. Something huge that have caught my idea recently is the development of the next generation of printing technology, called 4-D printing.
The idea is to now make 3-dimensional products which can actually take over the process of production so that they can actually finish the job of the printers themselves. This is what has been described by the early promoters of the movement called “4D-Printing”. This idea let me think about what would be the implications of this 4D Printing technology to our goal.
I will upload a video of the specific TED Talk done below.
The picture below is one which I clipped from the video (around time 50 second time frame) which show just how many different types of application this next generation of printing can be used for…
It is amazing to see what is now being created in our age of exponential growth of technological innovation, as claimed by Ray Kurzweil. I would love to live up to the 22nd century just to see where we are going to end up in the next century, hoping that we don’t kill ourselves or go extinct in this century.
Will we in the year 2101 finally have colonized Mars, or the Moon, and found or been contacted by some extraterrestrial intelligent life outside of our planet? Or would we be pushed to the edge of extinction due to our waste of the natural resources of our planet, causing the extinction of 90% of all the flora and fauna species, polluting the oceans, destroying the rain forest, and eating all the fish until there is nothing left?
It is too hard to predict where we will be in the future, but we live in a very interesting time.
As for the possibility of using this technology for biomedical reasons, I strongly believe that within even a decade, we will be using 4-Dimensional Printing technology to create biological tissues which can grow bigger themselves. I imagine it similarly to the idea of cellular automata spoken about by Stephen Wolfram where a complex, self evolving organism is completely organically grown from a much simpler organic compound which just followed a few rules of physics.
If the tissue can grow bigger themselves, and even spontaneously organize themselves into the shapes, and forms that is found in our own bodies, then we can create the epiphyseal growth plate cartilage tissue needed to expand to help make us taller. Not only that, the type of biological tissues that we can build would be much more organized that what nature can provide for us.
Imagine a 3D Printed collagen filled like cartilage disc which starts to turn into 4D by being “smart” and learning to start to absorb the culture medium around it so that it can grow bigger over time. With a short (maybe 2 hour) surgery, you will have this smart tissue which is compatible to your body dissolve and gel with your bones but know also to how to expand in the axial direction to make your femur bones grow longer aka longitudinally.
Since the printed compound is much better organized with the chondrocytes in columns, the lengthening will be much more than using the same type of growth plates that you had when you were younger, going through natural growth periods. Just one cartilage implant can give your upper leg portion an increased length of 4 inches. Sure, 3D Printing is what is available right now, but 4D Printing will be an even more revolutionary technological breakthrough.
Another implant first injected in liquid form can learn how to mold & solidify itself into the space between the knee joints and create a completely new layer of articular cartilage, thus reversing the effects of osteoarthritis.